Craig Higginson's 90-minute play sharply dramatises the South African dilemma: that, for all the attempts at truth and reconciliation, old memories still fester. Produced in 2007 by Johannesburg's Market theatre, where Higginson is literary manager, the play vividly demonstrates how divisions of class, age and race obstinately persist in the post-apartheid world.

Set in KwaZulu-Natal, the play depicts an elderly white couple, the disgruntled Patricia and her mentally confused husband Richard, on the eve of abandoning their farm to live in retirement in Durban. Suddenly their peace is shattered by the arrival of a nattily clad businessman who, it transpires, is their former garden boy, once known as Look Smart. He has come to confront Patricia with the reason why he deserted them: his conviction that his fiancee, Grace, who died after being savaged by a dog, was deliberately killed by the rapacious Richard.

Higginson's plotting is overneat, but what he conveys is the way past actions are loaded with different meanings. Patricia was responsible for Look Smart's schooling but, for him, her cultural benevolence is a reminder that "all we blacks are your children"; even Patricia's gesture in covering her car seats with protective blankets when Grace was rushed to hospital is proof to Look Smart of his old employer's inherent racism. And, even if the play's point about the relativity of truth is a touch schematic, Katie McAleese's production is stunningly acted. Janet Suzman's Patricia is a model mixture of sadness, solitude and guilt; Ariyon Bakare's Look Smart is equally torn between angry reparation and regret, and there is staunch support from Bernard Kay and Gracy Goldman. As the world's sporting focus shifts to South Africa, it is salutary to be reminded of the country's unhealed wounds.